Otherwise Known as the Human Condition

I’ve been curious for a while about the work of my near-namesake Geoff Dyer, and recently checked out a copy of his fat compendium Otherwise Known as the Human Condition.

The book is divided into sections called Visuals, Verbals, Musicals, Variables, and Personals. I am usually a dutiful book reader, making my way through collections like this in the order the author and publisher have seen fit to present them. But in this case I guessed that more than a hundred pages of art criticism might be a wearisome way to begin, and that I might do better to find out something about the author before trusting his judgment on photographs, books, and music.

So I started at the back, with Personals, which turned out to be a good way to do it. I was pleased to read about Dyer’s childhood devotion to comic books and model airplanes, and his early-adulthood devotion to sex, drugs, and the dole. And I was pleased to find out that the title essay is not a ponderous piece on the meaning of life but is mostly devoted to the author’s quest for the perfect New York City doughnut-and-cappuccino combination. (The ultimate doughnuts, it seems, are manufactured by the Doughnut Plant, whose website—by Bluefuse Design—is animated and annoyingly high-bandwidth, and was probably expensive, but which does inform you that their doughnuts are available at Dean & Deluca, Zabars, Citarella, Joe’s Art of Coffee, Oren’s Daily Roast, and Agata & Valentina.)

This background helps the reader approach Dyer’s works of criticism with enjoyment but a little less reverence than one might otherwise bring. The best of these, I think, are the literary pieces collected in Verbals, and I particularly appreciated Dyer’s enthusiasm for Ryszard Kapuscinski.

His books may be rooted in his own experience, but they are full of amazing digressions, little essays—in Imperium—on how to make cognac, on the history of the Armenian book, on anything and everything. And yet these digressions are always integral to the conception of the work. In his nomadic life he has described real places—like the city of crates in Angola in the famous opening of Another Day of Life—that are as fantastical as Calvino’s invisible cities.

I reviewed Another Day of Life when it came out in 1987, but it would never occur to me to think that anything about it was famous. Linking it to Invisible Cities, one of my famous books, makes this tribute even better.